To me, Tai Snaith's work has always seemed
like the product of an innocence both cheeky and brutal. A series of messages
delivered in the same way a child might exclaim in the supermarket queue,
"Mummy is that a man or a lady?"

In her installations, paintings and
collages, Snaith has given us strange, displaced objects and non-animals­—born
not to charm but to challenge the deeply carved and mostly dead-straight ruts
of human thinking. She is not an animist. She doesn't translate the statements
of objects (or animals), but she thinks more like they do, and the general
message seems to be, "Well, guys, you're missing something here, but don't
blame us." It's a window to a beautiful new world for any straight-arrow
logician—albeit it one marred by tension, absurdity and vague horror.

What happens, though, when the childlike
soothsayer grows up, looks around, and finds herself surrounded by a legion of
fantastical, grumbling, honest, beautiful, mean-spirited and whimsical
artifacts? Suddenly seeing herself in them the way the rest of us see ourselves
in our carefully chosen modernist stovetop coffee machines, or our show-offy
deep-sea diving watches or our credit-debt leather jackets? Snaith is crossing
over somehow with this new work—and along the way she's found more questions
the rest of us didn't know we could ask.

Since cubism threw the aesthetic world into
chaos, there have been seventeen thousand definitions of art, but let's pick
one to use right now: it helps us think about our relationships with objects.
How we physically see them, how they make us feel, how we place value on them.
With thank you notes to Duchamp, Warhol, even Emin, today's conceptual artists
are still re-purposing everyday objects as artworks. In 2009, Chinese artist
Song Dong installed the entire contents of his mother's house at MoMA for a
work entitled 'Waste Not'. Fearing waste as a result of a lifetime of poverty,
Song's mother carefully saved every item she ever acquired—from a coke bottle
to a paper-thin flake of soap. Her son helped her let go of these objects by
granting them a new purpose in his work.

Snaith is grappling with a completely
different problem: in the words of Talking Heads, "Well, how did I get
here?"

What are these things to me? This pot
plant, this jar, this plastic juice machine with a spout, this Kermit the Frog
doll, this single billiard ball, this unraveled shoulder bag, these
pastel-coloured Tupperware sporks? As if waking from a lengthy dream, Snaith
looks around with a growing feeling of outrage and wants to know how these things
invaded her life. And—worse—why she can't let them go.

It's embarrassing, right? That feeling you
get at a garage sale when some lady from down the road tries on your lime green
fingerless gloves and suddenly you desperately want them back. "Actually,
those aren't for sale," you mumble, as you shove them safely away
underneath the card table you're using as the purge checkout. What part of
yourself are those horrible gloves harbouring? And how did they extract it?

And so it becomes a negotiation. You versus
your stuff.

Just as we have limited days on earth, we
have limited space for crap. What we fill it with, in the end, is who we are.
Snaith is exploring the tension that emerges when those days and those spaces
are hijacked. When we get moments and objects we never chose for ourselves—that
instead chose us.

Unlike the prophets of purge, however
(those Sunday magazine minimalists), Snaith has decided to offer her
interloping possessions an amnesty. She has sorted them, stacked them and
immortalised them on paper. In doing so she’s giving them a chance to prove
their worth. And giving herself a chance to be who, it turns out, she is.